These eight players have at least two significant aspects of their lives in common:

Jose Dominguez… Miguel Sulbaran… Frank Encarnacion… Jose Ramirez… Andy Taveras… Junior Lopez… Elniery Garcia… Starling Marte.

Minor leaguers, except for Marte, they were all born in the Dominican Republic, and they are all serving suspension for violating Major League Baseball’s drug policy. They all tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs. In fact, they are the eight most recent players who tested positive and were suspended in a two-week period this month.

Most intriguing about the suspensions is that the players are all Dominican. Why should that be? Is there something about the island that leads the native players to use steroids? Do players from other Latin countries use steroids, test positive and incur suspensions?

A study of the list of players who have been suspended shows that players from other countries, especially Latin countries, have also been caught using illegal substances and suspended.

For example, of the 140 players who have been suspended this year and last, 81, or 57.9%, were born in North America while 59, or 42.1%, were born in Latin America. Nevertheless, of the 59 born in Latin America, 43, or 72.9%, are Dominican natives.

Among the remaining 16 Hispanics, 7 are Venezuelan, 3 are from Puerto Rico, 2 are Nicaraguan natives and four countries have one player each – Aruba, Colombia, Cuba and Panama.

Not that this is a competition to see which country can have the largest contingent of P.E.D. users, but the Dominican Republic easily surpasses other Latin countries and holds its own in comparison with the United States. One example of that:

Six players have tested positive and incurred three suspensions each. Three or the six are Dominican, the other three U.S. born.

Only one of the six has been banned from baseball permanently. He is a Dominican, Jenrry Mejia, the former New York Mets closer. He earned his lifetime ban with his third positive test Feb. 12, 2016. His previous positives came April 11, 2015, costing him 80 games (basically half a season), and July 28 of the same year, resulting in a 162-game ban, or a full season.

The second 2015 suspension came only 108 days after the first, ending his season and, as it turned out, his career. Three positive tests in 10 months – what a way to kill a career. It’s like the programs you see on television, where the bad guy deliberately gets a cop to shoot him fatally. They call it suicide by cop.

Only Mejia took steroids to kill his career – Boldenone the first time, Stanozolol the second and for the grand finale, a combination of the two.

In exploring the steroids situation, I was coming to the theory that something had to be lacking in Major League Baseball’s education of its players on the dangers of the use of P.E.D.’s, especially the education of Hispanic players.

I first called Dan Halem, baseball’s chief legal officer, who deals with drug matters. Is my sense correct, I asked him, that Hispanic players are more susceptible to steroids than other segments of the M.L.B. population.

“I haven’t looked at the numbers and broken it down by major and minor league compared with the population,” Halem said. “The numbers are the numbers, but I’d like to make sure I have them right before answering questions about them. I’ll take a look at them and break it down by major league and minor league. I’ll take a look at the numbers. I’ll take a look at the numbers and get back to you.”

That was last Thursday morning. Unfortunately, as I write this Saturday night, Halem has not gotten back to me yet.

I next turned to Omar Minaya, who is an official with the Players Association after having served as general manager of the New York Mets and the Montreal Expos. He is a top-flight talent evaluator and knows a thing or two about young Dominicans and P.E.D.’s because as a native of the Dominican Republic he was once a young Dominican.

“It’s been like that for a long time,” Minaya said. “I think part of it has to do with education. It’s different in Latin America where trainers get kids at a younger age. In the U.S. you don’t hire a trainer. You have a high school coach. In Latin America the kids usually train earlier. These trainers have a huge influence on them and sometimes they convince them to do things that are risky. You take a chance and you risk it. That happens at a younger age.”

Trainers exert great influence on young players, and trainers stand to benefit financially if a player is good enough to sign with a major league team. The better a player is the bigger a signing bonus he will receive and that, in turn, means a bigger payday for the trainer and better young players for his stable.

“They lack education and they’re influenced by individuals who aren’t good individuals,” Minaya said. “You have a lot of good trainers, but it takes only one or two. You have guys going back to back. Mejia went from being a 30-save closer to testing positive three times in a year.”

Players who test positive often claim they didn’t know the product they consumed contained illegal substances. That’s a convenient excuse, but it doesn’t carry any weight to excuse the player.

One person told of home remedies prepared in Latin homes by a player’s mother or grandmother. The player would be better off by declining it. He might insult his mother or grandmother, but he would be safer as far as penalties go if the home remedy had a banned substance in it.

“They don’t know what’s in them,” said a person who is close to players. But if they were to test positive, would that put them in harm’s way? The answer is yes. They’re responsible for it. It’s a different world. As much as you continue to hammer home being diligent, it can be tough at times.”

Minaya offered another explanation for young players getting sucked into steroids. “As a kid,” he explained, “you’re injected with B-12 shots, which are legal. We have the D.E.A. here. Down there you don’t have that. You grow up with B-12. That’s supposed to give you strength and energize you, whatever you want to call it.”

Despite his attempt to explain the Dominican mystery, Minaya was as puzzled as everyone else. “I don’t have an answer,” he said. “I really don’t.”

In some instances it’s easy to see why a player would try P.E.D’s. Manny Ramirez tested positive twice, in 2009 and ’11, at a time he was attempting comebacks at ages 37 and 39.

In March 2005 Rafael Palmeiro had already hit more than 500 home runs and was on the verge of reaching 3,000 hits when he swore under oath that he had never used steroids. Later that year he was suspended.

Maybe he used steroids that season because he was afraid at the age of 40 he couldn’t get the hits he needed without the aid of chemistry.

Maybe in 2012 Bartolo Colon was feeling his age – 39 – and couldn’t see far enough into the future and know he would win 72 games in the next five seasons so he used testosterone and was suspended for 50 games.

But why did Starling Marte use enough Nandrolone to get him nailed for 80 games? He had just reached the apex of his six-season career, bumping Andrew McCutchen to right field, and now he has bumped himself into a half-season vacation without pay that he doesn’t want.

Marte, 28, is No. 27 on the list the commissioner’s office uses to track drug suspensions and 1 of 2 major leaguers on this year’s list. Garcia, a minor league pitcher who is on Philadelphia’s 40-man major league roster, is the other.

No player wants to make Commissioner Rob Manfred’s roster of drug cheats, but there aren’t too many players as shrewd as Barry Bonds was in avoiding Bud Selig’s list.

Bonds was distastefully clever in avoiding it and conviction by a federal jury in San Francisco. It’s not everybody who can break home run records and beat a perjury conviction.